Once
by Tricki
Summary: His smile falls and honest Robert is behind it. Honest Robert is a genuine threat to her resolve. "Was I very bad to you, Jo?" [Robert x Jo]


**AN:** I fell in love with Cuffs almost immediately and I'm so devastated it was cancelled. This is my small attempt at keeping the love alive.

 **Summary:** Jo loved Robert once.

 **Set:** About eight months after season one ends.

 **Spoilers:** References to the major points in Robert and Jo's arc in season one.

 **Pair:** Robert x Jo

 **Disclaimer:** I own nothing. The Beeb owns it all and Amanda Abbington makes it brilliant.

* * *

 _Once_

 _by Tricki_

"I loved you so much once."

Jo Moffat says this as lightly as something so meaningful can be said, but he can see the tightness around her eyes. The pain he caused her has a long half life, he knows that now. He's sorry for it.

She's sitting drinking on a section of stone wall near the Seasick Doughnut - a Detective Sergeant casually breaking the law with the Chief Superintendent of the South Sussex Police. She lifts her beer to her lips, the amber of the bottle catching the nearby lights of Brighton Pier. Robert wishes, as he so often does in personal situations, that he knew the correct way to respond. He chooses to take a swig of his own beer instead.

Jo tucks her spare hand between her thighs to keep it warm and offers him that fragile, tender smile that belies her unquestionable strength, belies the fact that it is she who left him and not the other way around.

He meets her grey blue eyes from across the other side of the breakwater. "And then what happened?"

The huff of a laugh bursts from Jo's nose as her eyes slide away from him, back to Brighton, back to the glittering lights of the tourist trap restaurants as her mind travels back to that first period of adjusting to being without him.

The smile she bestows on him when she eventually comes back to the moment is a challenge. "I realised I deserved better." Robert's lips curve in response. Jo tries not to think about the fact that he is always most attractive when he smiles. But he is. God he is.

His smile falls and honest Robert is behind it. Honest Robert is a genuine threat to her resolve. "Was I very bad to you, Jo?"

Jo pushes her hair behind her ear unnecessarily, scratches her forehead with the nail of her index finger, reliving nights of being stood up, days of pretending they were nothing to each other. "You almost broke me, Robert." She whispers so softly she'll be surprised if he can hear her over the ocean. Her voice only wavers once, which she takes as a victory.

Robert's brown eyes have settled evenly on her face, the amber flecks in them an almost perfect match for the amber of her bottle. He's sizing her up in true police officer fashion. She wonders what he was hoping to achieve when he asked her to come for a walk with him; he'd just wanted her company, wanted to see what it was like to spend time with her eight months down the track. She'd taken convincing, more than he'd expected if he was honest, but eventually she'd acceded.

" _I'm bringing Burning Sky..."_ He'd coaxed and her lips had fought to curl into a smile while she controlled them into an impassive line; it was a gesture familiar from the beginning of them, those early days when it had been him chasing her and not the other way around. _"It's just a walk, Sergeant_. _"_ Her lips had won, breaking into that smile. _"Go on then."_

Robert wishes he'd sat beside her rather than across from her; wishes he was close enough to touch her somehow. But this isn't about what he wants; for once this is about giving her the space to say the things she needs to say to him.

She catches him off guard though, locking eyes with him and asking "Is Debbie still in the ICU?"

"Yes." He says evenly. "...The doctors think it won't be long now."

"I'm sorry." Jo says, and she means it. It's a bad situation, but it always was, and Debbie has always been the only one free of fault.

"Thank you. I've done very badly by her." He takes a pause, gathering strength to make a rare emotional admission. "And you. I never meant to hurt you. I hope you know that."

Jo's anger towards him spikes in a way it hasn't in many, many months, and she can't stop herself from biting out "No, I know that. You never mean to hurt any of us, but you do because you're only ever thinking about what you want." She casts her eyes to the ground, trying to gather herself, trying not to break the pleasant mood that was almost ready to take hold.

"That's not unfair." He says, waiting for her to meet his eyes again, hoping she will, hoping she won't down her beer and leave. "But I'm trying not to do that anymore."

Jo takes a greedy gulp of air, the salt hitting the back of her throat, calming her. She nods. "I know."

"I really am."

"I know." She repeats, but the undertone is still there. He once hurt her terribly, and she won't soon forget it.

"I'm sorry." He murmurs, wishing he could close the distance between them without her reading it as an approach.

"You know when I realised it?" Jo asks, sniffing deliberately, refusing to admit she has just almost cried over this man again. "I was dealing with this fraud victim. Y'know, one of those lonely hearts scams? And everything she said, I kept thinking 'How _stupid_ is this woman? This guy doesn't even exist.' And then I realised I was doing almost exactly the same thing. I was chasing after this... this ghost of you. This idea of you. And the you I got was barely even real."

"Sometimes." Robert admits. "But sometimes I felt like you were the only person I was real with."

"Why do I feel like you've used that line before? And not on me."

"I'm trying to be honest with you, Jo." He says, and there's barely enough of a hint of injury in his normally stoic voice for her to detect.

He watches her shift on her perch, collapsing in on herself. She is usually so upright, so outward. She gestures expressively and stands her ground. He wishes he could apologise for making her so unsure, so battered. Her bottle of Burning Sky pale ale is dangling, ignored, from the fingers of her right hand. In anticipation of a difficult question he takes a long drag on his own. As if on cue, as soon as he returns his bottle to the flat patch of stone beside him she speaks.

"Robert, did - did you... Did you ever love me? Even a bit?"

His breathing is deliberately even, his eyes are steady on hers, but there's a pause, an agonising pause. Jo is so afraid of what's contained in his silence that she almost cuts him off before he begins.

"Yes." His says softly. "Yes I did." She nods in response, presses her lips together tightly, blinks. It's slow, but Robert begins to move across the breakwater to her.

He takes her in his arms gently, trepidation slowing his movements. Jo, despite having an initial urge to push him away - a trained response, one she's forced herself to develop for self preservation - rests her face against his chest and allows herself to be held, allows the familiar smell and feel of him to fill her senses. He smells high ranking; like cologne and paperwork rather than sweat and food from the staff cafe. She used to crave the smell of him, back before she'd weaned herself off of him properly.

It's Jo who withdraws first, but before she can congratulate herself she is reaching for his face, swiping her thumb over a tiny scar over his right eyebrow.

"You know how worried I was when this happened? God, it must have been one of the most stressful days I've had on the job."

"In all honesty it wasn't my favourite day on the job either."

They share a smile, and the treacherous part of Jo misses falling asleep beside him, curling into his side.

He is still moving tentatively when he lifts his hand to curve around her cheek. In spite of herself Jo moves her cheek against his palm, enjoying the contact with his hands. They're so familiar, still, his large palms that once would have been rough, when he was a rookie, but over the years have softened, been softened by desk work and the posh hand soap in his office en suite.

"I'm sorry for all the time I left you waiting for me."

"My own stupid fault for waiting." Jo retorts with her characteristic broken Jo grin. His hand is a gentle reminder for her to keep looking at him. She winds her hand around it, peels it away from her face but keeps it clasped in her own. Her hand is too small to encase his the way his used to envelop hers. She remembers waking up in the middle of the night, expecting him to have gone, finding him pressed against her back, nose resting in the curve of her shoulder, arm draped over her side, hand closed around hers. She remembers feeling so safe, so secure, and then being hit by the realisation that she had awoken so suddenly because he would invariably slip away from her under cover of darkness, and she would find herself alone in the morning. Robert-less. Cold. She remembers the handful of nights she'd been able to keep him, every time but one because Debbie had been in hospital. She remembers how much she had longed for them and how much she had hated herself for wanting them.

That smile still playing about her lips she looks back to him, "Besides, I used to think you were worth it. Stupid, eh?"

Robert laughs, the first time in a week he's properly laughed. "Completely." He smiles at her. His smile has always been a rarity, and she is glad to see it tonight.

In the retelling Jo will say Robert was the first to lean in to her, but the truth is quite the opposite. She seeks his lips a full two seconds before he seeks hers. It's a chaste kiss they exchange, just the firm press of lips against lips. It feels like goodbye, and it is.

When they eventually separate Jo laughs softly, derisively at herself. "Look at us, snogging in front of the Seasick Doughnut like a couple of teenagers."

"I'd suggest we would have done more than that when we were teenagers."

"Yeah, well, we can mark that as one of the great mysteries of the world."

Robert nods, all traces of a smile wiped from his face. "I suppose so."

Jo shifts gear from leaving him to protecting him. She doesn't think she'll ever stop trying to do that. "You need to look after yourself, yeah?" Her fingers release his, run softly down the zipper of his jacket before falling back to her knee. He is about to brush her off, give her a comforting but phatic answer. She pre-empts him, murmuring "I mean it. You're no good to Debbie or Jake if you don't."

He nods, changes the subject by saying "Aren't I supposed to be the one giving you the pastoral care speech?", but she knows he's listened this time.

"I think job change is less of a wrench than - "

"Impending spousal death?" He replies, his lip quirking slightly despite the humourless topic.

"Robert..." She doesn't know exactly when he recaptured her hand.

"No, I'm serious. I've told DI Withers he's never getting any favours from South Sussex CID."

"Thanks, thanks for that. I'm sure that's going to make my first week at the Met go really smoothly."

They share another fleeting smile.

"I'll miss you, you know. When you're in London."

"Yeah, I'm going to miss it here. But hey, it's only sixty miles."

Jo feels a little pang in her chest, the little twinge of all that could have been. It's the dying remnant of the voice inside her that used to insist their only problem was timing. If they'd met before Debbie got sick, or after Debbie had died, if he'd left her when Jake was young like he insists he'd almost done... if, if, if. There's always going to be an if.

"I'd better get back."

"Yes, of course. I can't keep you from your own going away do, can I?" He takes the hint, stepping away from her and collecting his beer from the low bluestone wall opposite her.

Bottles in hand they walk back to the bar, their arms brushing casually against each other until they're in sight of their colleagues.

When they walk back in Robert is left behind somewhere near the breakwater, replaced by Chief Superintendent Vickers. And that's fine, because Jo never loved him at all.

The next time Jo hears from him is six weeks later. He calls her in tears to tell her Debbie has died. Jo is racing out of the Met before she's properly hung up the phone, babbling apologies at her DI. Jo ignores the voice inside her that says she's reacting awfully quickly for someone she doesn't love anymore.


End file.
